Photography was destined to be involved with death. Reality is in color, but at its beginnings photography always discolored reality and turned it into black and white. Color is life, black and white is death. A ghost was hiding in the invention of photography.

- Nobuyoshi Araki, in an interview with Nan Goldin, 1995.

June 23 — Nobuyoshi Araki’s latest exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, EROS DIARY, is comprised of a series of 77 new black and white photographs, which break from his traditional ruminations on eroticism and death to reflect more inwardly on the artist’s own life and mortality. These photographs highlight an unusual softness and sombre introspection as Araki internalizes recent personal traumatic events including the loss of his beloved cat, Chiro, his fight with prostate cancer, and later, the loss of vision in his right eye.

Each photograph is timestamped in reference to Araki’s anniversary of his marriage to his wife Yoko, who died in 1990. This date also coincides with the Chinese Qixi Festival, also known as the Tanabata Festival in Japan, a celebration of the annual meeting of “The Cowherd and Weaver Girl,” an ancient Chinese folktale where two forbidden lovers reunite once a year for a single night. The persistent repetition of this date speaks at once to both the artist’s reverence for his spouse and original muse, while also highlighting her absence in his life.

For Araki, photography itself represents a diary: a record of what happens day to day in his life, and the act of taking a photograph represents the killing of a moment or life, where his “self” is pulled out through the subject. In consequence of this action, as well as his age, illness, and life experience, the images in EROS DIARY become memorialized, showing us the distinct humanistic truths of joy, sorrow, life and death. These images, which are at times humorous, sexual, melancholy, and reflective, depict the entire spectrum of life from a personal perspective foreshadowing death.

With a career spanning six decades, Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the most prolific photographers of all time, having published over 400 books and exhibited in over 280 solo shows worldwide. Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Araki began his career as a commercial photographer, before making the intensely sexual Kinbaku bondage photographs he became known for. In 1971 he published his seminal book Sentimental Journey, and in 1991, Winter Journey, documenting both the euphoria of his honeymoon and sadness from his wife’s death. EROS DIARY is Araki’s fourth exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery.

The exhibition opens on Thursday, July 9 and runs until August 7, 2015. The gallery’s summer hours are Monday through Friday from 6-8pm. For further information and images, please contact at gallery at 212.367.9663 or email: jasmin@antonkerngallery.com.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present, the next exhibition in his three 22nd Street galleries.

Focusing on four groups of artists practicing away from the cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles, What Nerve! presents an alternative history of American art since the 1960s. As the exhibition’s curator, Dan Nadel, has written, “When confronted with a system that seems impenetrable, outsiders tend to band together.”

The Chicago-based Hairy Who exhibited together from 1966 to 1969. Its members were Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. Funk Art took root in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s and is represented in the exhibition with works by Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson, Ken Price, Peter Saul, and Peter Voulkos. In Ann Arbor, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw formed Destroy All Monsters as students in the 1970s. Forcefield members Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, and Ara Peterson, active in Providence from 1996 to 2003, created fictional personas complete with pseudonyms and elaborate garments.

This exhibition reassesses the artists associated with these four groups, providing a new understanding of their influence on contemporary art history. Distinct as their artworks are in style, period, and place, the artists all share a common set of concerns. Inspired by a wide array of influences including folk art, advertising, primitive art, comic books, and fetishism, they all favor figurative imagery that diverges from the predominant artistic style of the time.

The groups presented here emerged from close collaboration and, in the case of Destroy All Monsters and Forcefield, experimental living arrangements. All of them embrace alternate aesthetics and unconventional media. Lawn chairs, purses, comic books, chain metal shrouds, and a video installation join rarely seen paintings and drawings.

The Collected Hairy Who Publications 1966 – 1969, the first book to gather the artist’s books of the Chicago-based Hairy Who into a single volume, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Accompanying it are a scholarly essay and an extensive archive of Hairy Who posters, exhibition photographs, and ephemera.

A version of the exhibition was presented last fall at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, which was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Dan Nadel, Robert Cozzolino, Dominic Molon, Roger Brown, John Smith, Naomi Fry, Michael Rooks, Nicole Rudick, and Judith Tannenbaum.

What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present will be on view at 502, 522, and 526 West 22nd Street from July 8 through August 14, 2015, Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For further information, please contact Ted Turner at (212) 243-0200 or ted@matthewmarks.com.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present, the next exhibition in his three 22nd Street galleries.

Focusing on four groups of artists practicing away from the cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles, What Nerve! presents an alternative history of American art since the 1960s. As the exhibition’s curator, Dan Nadel, has written, “When confronted with a system that seems impenetrable, outsiders tend to band together.”

The Chicago-based Hairy Who exhibited together from 1966 to 1969. Its members were Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. Funk Art took root in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s and is represented in the exhibition with works by Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson, Ken Price, Peter Saul, and Peter Voulkos. In Ann Arbor, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw formed Destroy All Monsters as students in the 1970s. Forcefield members Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, and Ara Peterson, active in Providence from 1996 to 2003, created fictional personas complete with pseudonyms and elaborate garments.

This exhibition reassesses the artists associated with these four groups, providing a new understanding of their influence on contemporary art history. Distinct as their artworks are in style, period, and place, the artists all share a common set of concerns. Inspired by a wide array of influences including folk art, advertising, primitive art, comic books, and fetishism, they all favor figurative imagery that diverges from the predominant artistic style of the time.

The groups presented here emerged from close collaboration and, in the case of Destroy All Monsters and Forcefield, experimental living arrangements. All of them embrace alternate aesthetics and unconventional media. Lawn chairs, purses, comic books, chain metal shrouds, and a video installation join rarely seen paintings and drawings.

The Collected Hairy Who Publications 1966 – 1969, the first book to gather the artist’s books of the Chicago-based Hairy Who into a single volume, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Accompanying it are a scholarly essay and an extensive archive of Hairy Who posters, exhibition photographs, and ephemera.

A version of the exhibition was presented last fall at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, which was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Dan Nadel, Robert Cozzolino, Dominic Molon, Roger Brown, John Smith, Naomi Fry, Michael Rooks, Nicole Rudick, and Judith Tannenbaum.

What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present will be on view at 502, 522, and 526 West 22nd Street from July 8 through August 14, 2015, Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For further information, please contact Ted Turner at (212) 243-0200 or ted@matthewmarks.com.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to announce BLACK/WHITE, a group exhibition curated by Brian Alfred. The exhibition will open on 9 July 2015 and will remain on view through 14 August 2015. Receptions for the artists will be held on 9 July and 23 July from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The public is welcome.

A diverse group of thirty artists, working in a range of mediums, are immersed in dialog through the selective lens of black and white.

The works included explore the effectiveness of this limited palette to depict light and space, mimic three- dimensionality, and allow for a greater focus on form, line, and subject.

Works rich with symbolism, metaphor, and association are juxtaposed against each other creating surprising and bold pairings. Together these works explore the constraint of black and white while visually rendering theoretical themes.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present, the next exhibition in his three 22nd Street galleries.

Focusing on four groups of artists practicing away from the cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles, What Nerve! presents an alternative history of American art since the 1960s. As the exhibition’s curator, Dan Nadel, has written, “When confronted with a system that seems impenetrable, outsiders tend to band together.”

The Chicago-based Hairy Who exhibited together from 1966 to 1969. Its members were Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. Funk Art took root in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s and is represented in the exhibition with works by Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson, Ken Price, Peter Saul, and Peter Voulkos. In Ann Arbor, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw formed Destroy All Monsters as students in the 1970s. Forcefield members Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, and Ara Peterson, active in Providence from 1996 to 2003, created fictional personas complete with pseudonyms and elaborate garments.

This exhibition reassesses the artists associated with these four groups, providing a new understanding of their influence on contemporary art history. Distinct as their artworks are in style, period, and place, the artists all share a common set of concerns. Inspired by a wide array of influences including folk art, advertising, primitive art, comic books, and fetishism, they all favor figurative imagery that diverges from the predominant artistic style of the time.

The groups presented here emerged from close collaboration and, in the case of Destroy All Monsters and Forcefield, experimental living arrangements. All of them embrace alternate aesthetics and unconventional media. Lawn chairs, purses, comic books, chain metal shrouds, and a video installation join rarely seen paintings and drawings.

The Collected Hairy Who Publications 1966 – 1969, the first book to gather the artist’s books of the Chicago-based Hairy Who into a single volume, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Accompanying it are a scholarly essay and an extensive archive of Hairy Who posters, exhibition photographs, and ephemera.

A version of the exhibition was presented last fall at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, which was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with texts by Dan Nadel, Robert Cozzolino, Dominic Molon, Roger Brown, John Smith, Naomi Fry, Michael Rooks, Nicole Rudick, and Judith Tannenbaum.

What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present will be on view at 502, 522, and 526 West 22nd Street from July 8 through August 14, 2015, Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For further information, please contact Ted Turner at (212) 243-0200 or ted@matthewmarks.com.

Press Release
Dia Art Foundation Acquires Dream House by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Jung Hee Choi
Dream House Will Be Presented at Dia:Chelsea from June 16 to October 24, 2015
Just Alap Raga Ensemble Will Perform on June 13, 19, and 27, 2015

New York, NY – Today, Dia Art Foundation announced the acquisition of a unique version of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, titled Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House. Young and Zazeela created this new iteration in collaboration with their disciple, artist and musician Jung Hee Choi. In honor of this historic acquisition, Dia will present the unique version at Dia:Chelsea at 545 West 22nd Street from June 16 to October 24, 2015. As a long-time supporter of Young and Zazeela’s work, Dia presented Dream House at 6 Harrison Street in New York City from 1979 to 1985 and has supported and hosted numerous concerts and recordings of Young and Zazeela’s exceptional work. This acquisition demonstrates Dia’s strong commitment to fostering in-depth and long-term relationships with artists.

Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House will debut with a special series of Just Alap Raga Ensemble concerts on June 13, 19, and 27 with vocals by Young, Zazeela, and Choi and Naren Budhkar on the tabla. An ongoing series of scheduled performances will be held between June and October.

“Dream House is a landmark contribution to the history of sound and light, a truly immersive experience, and one of the most important manifestations of Young and Zazeela’s collaborations,” said Jessica Morgan, Director, Dia Art Foundation. “Since 2015 marks Young’s 80th birthday, Zazeela’s 75th birthday, and the 40th anniversary of the Dream Festival supported by Dia, it is the ideal moment to add this unique sound-and-light installation to Dia’s collection and ensure its vitality far into the future. We are thrilled to activate Dia’s space in Chelsea this summer by presenting Dream House with a full program of performances.”

The version of Dream House at Dia:Chelsea will incorporate a newly designed, site-specific sound-and-light environment that was conceived for Dia by Young, Zazeela, and Choi. The work will include a new configuration of its traditional elements—Young’s sine-wave sound environment and Zazeela’s light environment—and will incorporate a new version of Choi’s installation Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest IX .

Young, a crucial figure in the historical emergence of Minimalist music, is among the most influential representatives of the American avant-garde. He began using sustained tones and expanded concepts of time in the 1950s and formulated the Dream House concept with Zazeela in 1962. Together, they have developed numerous sound-and-light installations and performances, among which Dream House stands as the essential environment for their time-based performances.

Dream House has been described as “a time installation measured by a continuous frequency environment in sound and light, in which a work would be played continuously and ultimately exist in time as a living organism with a life and tradition of its own.” Understood as a durational work to be experienced several times over a lifetime, the first presentations of Dream House took place at Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich in 1969, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971, and the yearlong presentation of Dream House at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in 1972. The 1979–85 iteration Dream House at 6 Harrison Street in New York, commissioned by Dia, was followed by MELA Foundation’s long-term Dream House that opened in 1993 and continues to operate at 275 Church Street in New York today. Dia’s acquisition of the artists’ Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House will ensure the conservation and future presentations of this momentous installation.

About the Artists
La Monte Young (b. 1935, Bern, Idaho) began playing saxophone at age seven and pursued music studies in the 1950s with such recognized figures as Richard Maxfield, Leonard Stein, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. At Yoko Ono’s studio, Young directed the first loft concert series from 1960 to 1961. As a founding member of the Fluxus movement, he edited An Anthology of Chance Operations in 1963 and orchestrated many of the movement’s key events during the 1960s. In 1962, Young began collaborating with artist Marian Zazeela, featuring her light installations, sculptures, and calligraphic creations in his durational sound environments. They became disciples of master Kirana singer Pandit Pran Nath in 1970 and their works have addressed both Western traditions and Indian classical music ever since. Young is credited to be the founder of Minimalist music and is a historical reference for sustained-tone and drone-based compositions, such as The Well-Tuned Piano that is widely regarded as one of the major piano works of the twentieth century. Artists and musicians including John Cale, Walter De Maria, Brian Eno, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, Terry Riley, and Andy Warhol have acknowledged Young’s enormous impact. And together with his ensembles (from the Theater of Eternal Music to the Forever Bad Blues Band to the recent Just Alap Raga Ensemble), Young has influenced art-rock bands like the Velvet Underground, Faust, and many others.

Marian Zazeela (b. 1940, New York City) studied painting and calligraphy and has been working with light as a medium since the early 1960s. Her light installations and projection series have been widely shown throughout the United States and Europe. Since 1962, they have become an integral part of Dream House and the Theater of Eternal Music. Like Young, Zazeela has been a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath since 1970 and has devoted the last several decades to the performance of Indian classical music as part of their Just Alap Raga Ensemble. Typically taking the form of light environments and also performances, Zazeela’s works have been credited with influencing Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and have been the object of group and solo presentations at Dia, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and most recently at the Kunst im Regenbogenstadl Dream House in Polling, Germany, where a retrospective of her drawings was organized.

Jung Hee Choi (b. 1969, Seoul, Korea) has collaborated with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela since 1999. Choi’s work has been presented in Asia, Europe, and North America at such venues as FRAC Franche-Comté in Besançon, France; Berliner Festspiele in Berlin, Germany; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the MELA Foundation Dream House, New York; the FRESH Festival in Bangkok; and the Korea Experimental Arts Festival in Seoul. Choi is also a founding producer and director of Mantra TV—a cable and webcast vehicle for advanced arts in New York and Korea—where she worked from 1998 to 2006. Commissioned by MELA Foundation, her performance and installation with video and sound, titled RICE, was presented at the ongoing installation of Dream House at 275 Church Street in New York in 2003. In 2006 she received the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds Award, supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program, New York State Council on the Arts, and in 2015 she received a project grants award from New Music USA. As disciples of the classical Kirana vocal tradition, Young, Zazeela, and Choi founded the Just Alap Raga Ensemble in 2002. Choi has performed as vocalist in every concert ever since, including those at the MELA Foundation Dream House; the five-concert Pandit Pran Nath Memorial Tribute Tour in Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Polling, Germany, in 2012; the Yoko Ono Courage Award ceremony; the Guggenheim’s The Third Mind Live concert series in 2009; and the Merce Cunningham Memorial celebration in 2009. Her work is in the collection of FRAC Franche-Comté.

Dia Art Foundation
Founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term sites including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, which was inaugurated at Documenta 7 in 1982), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all of which are located in New York City; the Dan Flavin Art Institute (established in 1983) in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in Great Salt Lake, Utah; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany; and Flavin’s untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) (1973) in Munich, Germany. Dia also commissions original Artist Web Projects and produces scholarly publications.

Dia currently presents temporary installations, performances, lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in the Chelsea section of New York City, the neighborhood it helped pioneer. Plans for a new project space are underway.

P.P.O.W is pleased to announce a one person show of works on paper and video by Anthony Iacono. This is the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York City. Iacono's painted cutout collage technique updates the art historical languages of pop art and representation to further explore the body and its relationship to objects. Quotidian objects are always the foundation for Iacono's works. Fruit, plants and curtains are reconfigured from their original functions to ones of adolescent curiosity and physical pleasure. Performative gestures interact with these objects and transform into furniture and mirror the architecture of a space. Caught in private moments of leisure and play, the subjects are posed in theatrical scenarios and frozen “still life” gestures that are heightened by a high-contrast palette and sharp graphic form. Stillness plays an important role in all of the works, the objects lock truncated body parts into place, arresting any motion from the submissive subjects.

Beckoning the viewer with a coloring book style and using shallow space and cropping to provide an intimate setting, the works are both alluring and erotic. Through the cutouts, Iacono invites the viewer into a world where a lemon is served with a shrimp cocktail that is expertly balanced on a man’s buttocks, but also references a familiar technique used in autoerotic asphyxiation – a bite of a lemon wedge wakes one up and thus prevents death. The fetishistic play is meant to have an absurd, humorous narrative in its campiness. There is a dual objectification of the body and an anthropomorphization of inanimate objects that amplifies the disquietingly erotic scenes.

Iacono's new videos, like the works on paper, invite the viewer to witness the playful and absurd nature of fetishistic play. A man in his underwear squishes a grapefruit fixed against a pink tiled shower wall with his torso, hips, butt and chest. The sound of the grapefruit exhausting its juices is both perverse and comical as the persistent subject relentlessly commits to squeeze the grapefruit dry.

Anthony Iacono was born in 1987 in Nyack, NY and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York (2010) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2013) and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA (2007). He received the Robert M. Washburn Award for the Arts; Arts Council of Rockland Scholarship Award (2010). He has been included in group shows and project rooms in various Brooklyn and NY venues since 2009. In addition to collage and video, Iacono also creates sculpture and produces artist books.

Character traits are the myriad of distinct qualities that, in tandem, define our individuality. In isolation, each trait can seem predictable or cliché, yet within the context of art, these traits transcend their fixed entities to become infinitely idiosyncratic gestures, recombined in limitless ways to determine a unique point of view. Disembodied, and allowed to interact and mutate, these characteristics can evolve into an original visual language. Each artist in this exhibition evokes a surreal world inhabited by a litany of unorthodox and bizarre characters, creating a paragon of “sui generis” interpretations.

“Character Traits” brings together nine young artists who reinvigorate the rich intersection of figurative abstraction via distinctive compositions, materials and processes. Each artist channels a unique range of influences that capture the characteristic spirit of a culture, movement, or a specific time period, while representing an aesthetic very much in the now. Motifs reminiscent of modernism, outsider assemblage, thrift store paintings, psychedelic cartoons, and zine culture permeate the work. These artists are not defined by their inspiration, but rather by the way each one has refined their influences and impulses into something entirely personal, creating fascinating languages and symbols, from the eccentric to the mundane, in order to tell their stories.

Thatcher Projects is pleased to present H O T S P O T S, the gallery’s annual summer group exhibition featuring a selection of works that highlight the current studio practice of artists across the gallery program. Several artworks will introduce subtle shifts in the imagery or process of the artists, often times both, exhibited for the first time in New York.

Some of the artists, including Nobu Fukui, Teo Gonzalez, and David Mann, are relatively new to the gallery despite working in New York for several decades. In this exhibition, the gallery introduces Gonzalez’ “arch” paintings. Working from a loose, organic grid, Gonzalez evokes a moire effect as the cell-like spaces appear to expand and compress. David Mann adds linear elements that accompany his more familiar forms, directing the viewers’ eyes toward focal points throughout his ethereal compositions.

An IKEA fusion table and chairs set is reimagined as unique and culturally invaluable by Australian artist Gary Carsley, who wraps the prefabricated furniture with a depiction of extinct creatures and plants. The image, constructed from hi-resolution photographs of stone, serves as an homage to these vanished species while asking questions as to their demise.

Paintings by Carlos Estrada-Vega, Kevin Finklea and Jus Juchtmans, awash in color, may appear monochromatic at first. However, the careful layering of pigment by Juchtmans and Finklea prove that they are in fact complex shifts that are constantly in action.

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present No Vacancies, a group exhibition of works by Miyoko Ito (1918-1983), Phillip King (b. 1934), Robert Morris (b. 1931), and Lisa Williamson (b. 1977), organized by Kristen Becker. Featuring sculpture, oil paintings, and works on paper from the 1950s to the present, this show presents four artists whose works play with the viewer’s experience of form, density, depth and perceptual access. No Vacancies will be on view from June 26 through August 7, at 509 West 24th Street.
Rooted in a framework that includes iconic architecture, modernist presentations of the figure, and the artists’ own physical proportions, these works are grounded in specific sources but ultimately convey a more universal sense of spatial and figurative recognition. Dichotomies between angle and curve, architecture and body, presence and absence begin to emerge and slowly meld. Each work suggests an implied human occupancy, whether through the viewer’s spatial activation or through a representative association with the human form itself.

Phillip King’s sculptures are simultaneously classical and modern. Though known for his use of color, in the early 1960s King began exploring stripped-down forms in basic white plaster. Notably, this enduring medium was used as a structural and decorative material on the surface of the Egyptian pyramids; King visually reinforces that history by consistently using triangular forms as in Drift and Untitled I. The angular wood constructions highlight the undulations of the applied plaster composition. Sky Anchor and Window Piece follow an equally iconic tradition in their exploration of both positive and negative space. These works inhabit and shape the surrounding space, playfully encouraging the viewer to transgress boundaries and visually activate the sculpture.

Miyoko Ito’s paintings seduce the viewer, presenting dream-like atmospheres that exist in the space between abstraction and architectural rendering. The compositions hover, giving the sensation of a place that holds no fixed location. Ito’s color palette reinforces these works’ beguiling haze, as neutral backgrounds give way to brightly saturated forms, void of figures but filled with an intriguing presence. The artist’s clear nod to Surrealism combines with her place amongst linear Chicago Imagists to create wholly new and alluring environments in which to linger.

Throughout his career, Robert Morris has pursued a relentless physicality in his sculpture, drawings, dance, performance, and installation. He often employs his own body as an inherent system of rules, using his height and other measurements as a marker. The title of Tub suggests the containment of a body and its potential submersion, though the work’s leaning angle prompts an open reading as a protective structure or even an architectural apse. A similar ambiguity is visible in Morris’ labyrinth drawings as the mysterious compositions continue off the page. Vetti V provides a more direct anatomical reference. The title refers to the House of the Vettii, one of the most luxurious homes preserved in the ruins of Pompeii and notorious for its display of overtly sexual metaphors of abundance. The suggestive composition of the sculpture presents a literal counterpoint to the male display of its eponymous origin, while its grand scale and the physicality required to shape and transform the felt makes the artist’s own body a ghostly presence.

Lisa Williamson investigates mass and volume, prodding the viewer to surpass perceptual expectation and arrive at a restful state of comfortable ambiguity. Each form cuts into the surrounding space, creating lines and angles that are at once familiar and peculiar. Williamson diligently handles wood sculptures that reveal organic flaws and aberrations, resulting in an almost putty-like surface when painted. These works appear soft to the touch, a supple texture that belies their weight and density. Wavy Dimension (June) extends its curves upward with elegant and totemic intention while staying grounded in Williamson’s winsome sense of play. Long Dimension (Gates) sets the stage for personal and visual framing, demonstrating intrinsic formal restraint while providing an entry for insinuated passage. These suggestive interactions extend to Tender Dimension (Elephant) and Heavy Dimension (Tomb); their awkward height, subtly widening dimensions and satisfying sense of density and mass evoking both the elemental and the domestic. At once monumental and lively, Williamson’s works disclose the activated potential of solid form, both in space and in the mind’s eye.

For further information regarding No Vacancies, please contact Kristen Becker at kristen@boeskygallery.com or 212.680.9889. For press inquiries, please contact Elisa Smilovitz at elisa@mcclellandco.com or 551.486.3273.